Mad about the Girl: has science solved the riddle of Vermeer's masterpiece?

The eyes have it: Girl with a Pearl Earring – by Johannes Vermeer has fascinated and perplexed art historians for centuries
Credit: Universal History Archive

One unexpected joy of lockdown has been the trend on social media to share witty, home-grown recreations of famous paintings. After the Getty in LA last month urged followers online to mock up favourite artworks using three things lying around the house, the challenge quickly spread, and the results have grown ever more ingenious. In one post, an olive sleeping bag evokes the green dress in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. Tangled charging cables summon Caravaggio’s snake-haired Medusa. A yellow labrador, in a third, calls to mind Ingres’s Grande Odalisque.

The subset of the genre I most cherish, though, involves photographs of food: a sliced red pepper that resembles The Scream; a plate of folded ham that perfectly captures The Persistence of Memory. And, most brilliantly of all, a humble, sprouting brown onion that, embellished with a blue strap, and carefully lit against a dark background, conjures Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Unsurprisingly, the 17th-century Dutch master’s oil painting – the inspiration for the bestselling historical novel by Tracy Chevalier adapted, in 2003, into a film starring Scarlett Johansson – has found an afterlife on the internet. As well as being obviously gorgeous, Girl with a Pearl Earring is also thrillingly modern. A young woman wearing a blue-and-yellow headscarf swivels her head to the left while parting moist lips as though about to speak.

And that’s kind of it. On paper, not much. Yet, somehow, Vermeer captures a moment of intimacy and spontaneity with great intensity. Whoever this figure is, her presence, her psychology, feels palpable. Moreover, while many of Vermeer’s contemporaries would have placed her in a highly realistic setting, he offers something different: radiant, yet stripped back. And, thus, seemingly timeless. It’s hard to place this girl, which is why it’s still so easy to identify with her. Plus, of course, she’s highly reproducible. Which makes this the perfect Old Master painting for the digital age. Even Banksy has paid homage to Girl with a Pearl Earring, in a mural in Bristol that was recently updated with a surgical mask.

Last week, Vermeer’s painting sparked headlines again, following the announcement, at a virtual press conference organised by the Mauritshuis in The Hague, of the findings of a painstaking investigation into the picture by an international team of scientists.

A couple of years ago, I travelled to the Mauritshuis, where the work hangs, to report on a crucial phase of the project for the BBC. Vermeer’s Girl had been taken off the wall, removed from her frame, and carefully positioned, in public view behind glass, in a temporary laboratory set up within the museum’s opulent 17th‑century Golden Room.

The 1665 painting then received the art-historical equivalent of a full-body scan, as experts analysed it using 21st-century technology, including digital microscopy. At the time, Emilie Gordenker, then the director of the Mauritshuis, compared the approach to medical research. Indeed, some of the scientific techniques were borrowed directly from medicine. For instance, to study Vermeer’s translucent glazes, the team employed a non-invasive imaging technique called optical coherence tomography, which, as paintings conservator and head researcher Abbie Vandivere told me recently, is used to examine thin layers in the human eye.

After two weeks, Vandivere says, they had amassed nine terabytes of data, which it took many months to sift through. Paint was analysed, findings debated, until eventually it all came together in a diagnosis, revealed last week.

What, then, have we learnt? For one thing, it turns out that the Girl originally had eyelashes, which people thought Vermeer had omitted. (Curiously, though, he didn’t give her eyebrows.) For another, the artist’s signature, so hard to see in the upper left-hand corner, was confirmed: by mapping the different chemical elements, Vandivere explains, researchers could “visualise very precisely the layout of [Vermeer’s] monogram”: IVMeer. And we now understand the order in which Vermeer painted the picture, as well as changes he made along the way.

Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), self portrait, 1656

Arguably the greatest surprise, though, was the discovery of several diagonal lines in the painting’s upper right-hand corner. According to Vandivere, these once represented folds of dark-green fabric, suggesting that Vermeer painted his Girl against a curtain that disappeared over the centuries as the uppermost paint layers discoloured. In other words, Vermeer positioned his Girl not in front of a formless dark expanse but within, as Vandivere puts it, “a defined space”. For Vandivere, this enhances the painting’s “intimacy”.

I wonder, too, whether the curtain emphasises an atmosphere of make-believe and fantasy. After all, during the 17th century, Vermeer’s picture would have been understood as a “tronie” – ie, a study of a head and shoulders in exotic clothing, rather than a portrait of someone specific. That Eastern-looking turban is the giveaway: Vermeer’s Girl isn’t a Dutch lass but a type – perhaps “a sibyl or a figure from the Bible”, as Gordenker once suggested to me. By subtly evoking a stage, could a curtain augment this sense of role play? Dutch paintings expert Marjorie E Wieseman, of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, agrees that “there is an aura of theatricality about the painting”, but doubts a curtain in the background would mean “definitively” that Vermeer’s Girl was a figure from the stage. If anything, for Wieseman, the curtain makes the painting “more traditional”, because curtains appear in so many Dutch portraits – “while the flat dark [background] is stark and abstract and perhaps a factor in the painting’s timeless appeal”. Still, Wieseman agrees with specialists who suggest that the impossibly oversized earring in Vermeer’s painting must have been a piece of costume jewellery.

According to Wieseman, pearls, during the Baroque era, were “probably the most coveted gem”. And Vermeer painted pearls a lot: they appear in half of his three dozen pictures that have survived. Here, miraculously, the single-drop earring is an illusion, fashioned from nothing but touches of translucent and opaque white paint. It’s bravura brushwork.

Last week, we gleaned something else about the earring: that the ore in Vermeer’s lead white was mined in the Peak District. Of greater significance, perhaps, is Vermeer’s liberal use in the headscarf of ultramarine, which was notoriously laborious to prepare. Made from semiprecious lapis lazuli, which was mined in Afghanistan, ultramarine was, in the artist’s lifetime, more expensive than gold. Moreover, the ultramarine that Vermeer preferred was the highest possible quality. Unfortunately, this begs as many questions as it answers. How could Vermeer, who had a large family of 11 children who survived infancy, afford it? Did a rich patron pay for it up front? Conversely, if the canvas was a tronie painted for the open market, why would Vermeer take a big financial risk by using so much ruinously expensive pigment? This, says Vandivere, is “still a mystery”.

It’s not the only one. For all the ingenuity and endeavour of Vandivere and her team, the painting’s biggest mystery – the identity of the model – remains unsolved. Was Vermeer’s “Girl” his daughter, a lover, or did he simply make her up? We just don’t know. Isn’t that frustrating?

“No,” Vandivere replies, with a laugh. “We found out so much about where Vermeer’s pigments came from and the steps he took to make the painting – and those were our research questions.”

I can’t help thinking of Keats’s jibe at Newton, whom he accused of having “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours”. After spending four years studying Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vandivere is probably better acquainted with the painting than anybody else. Yet, for her, Vermeer’s Girl has become “the product of a build-up of so many layers of paints and materials that have come from all over the world, which I can’t separate from the beautiful image I see in front of me.” Only a scientist, perhaps, could divine the poetry in that.